Trouble Follows Me

by Ross Macdonald

  I went into the next room to get a towel to hide it. Mary was standing in the hall doorway, very pale and tall. “She’s dead, isn’t she?”

  “Yes. Don’t come in.”

  There were footsteps in the hall, and Eric appeared at her shoulder. His flesh was the color of a dead man’s and his eyes were set as if he had forgotten to blink them.

  “Something’s happened to Sue,” he said.

  Mary moved out of his way and he pushed me aside without knowing it. It would have been a thankless job to fight him for the sake of saving him nightmares. He said to the dead woman: “Darling, you shouldn’t have done it. I’d have done anything.”

  Then he lay down on the floor beside her and hid his face in her hair, which flourished on the dusty rug like a black forest. A man’s dry crying is a poor imitation of a woman’s melodious weeping, but it is more terrible in its effect. His retching sobs opened another trapdoor in the bottom cellar of pity and horror. I shut the door on him so Mary wouldn’t see.

  “Where did she get the rope?” I asked.

  “There’s one in every upstairs room. Look.” She pointed to a hook beside the dressing-room windows where another yellow rope hung in a coil. I had an instinctive desire to take it away and burn it.

  “What in God’s name do they leave things like that around for?”

  “It’s a fire escape, the only one they have.”

  “And I suppose they serve you hemlock with your dinner, just in case you want to take a sip or two between courses in the Socratic manner.”

  “Don’t talk so much and for God’s sake don’t try to be funny,” Mary said wearily. “You hardly knew Sue, but I did.” Her neck drooped like a wilting flower’s stalk, and there was nothing I could do for her at all.

  A petty officer wearing a black and yellow Shore Patrol armband came into the room with four or five people at his heels. Their faces were blankly eager. I thought of a pack of necrophagous jackals. Mrs. Merriwell was one of them, and the Eurasian manager, tense and stammering, was another.

  The SP man, who was young and worried-looking, said: “My name’s Baker, sir. I understand there’s been a very bad accident.”

  “Come into the next room. The value of publicity is sometimes over-estimated—”

  “Accident nothing,” Mrs. Merriwell bayed. “I don’t believe it was suicide. That awful nigger was up in that very room. I saw him in the hallway coming out.”

  “When was this?” Baker said. “And who are you talking about, Madam?”

  “That horrible black steward, the one with the crumpled ears. He’d have frightened me out of my wits up here if I didn’t know how to handle niggers. I believe he raped that girl and hanged her to cover up.”

  Baker looked at me and then at the door to the inner room. I nodded, and he opened the door wide enough to slip through. The door opened again a moment later and Eric came out awkwardly as if propelled from behind. He looked at the little crowd in the doorway like an amateur actor facing his first audience. I told them that if they had to wait it would have to be in the hall. Mary got up and moved out with them.

  “What right have you, young man?” said Mrs. Merriwell. I shut the door in her face.

  Eric sat down in front of the dressing table on a stool covered with cheap yellow lace. He examined his face in the mirror with profound intensity, as if he was seeing it for the first time. Grief has curious gestures, and this was one of them. His face didn’t please him, and he turned away.

  “I don’t look so good,” he said tonelessly.

  “No.”

  “Why do you suppose she did it, Sam?”

  “I don’t know, I hardly knew her.”

  “Could she have killed herself because she loved me? I mean because I couldn’t marry her?”

  “She could have. But if that’s true don’t ever let yourself be proud of it.”

  “You’re pretty brass-tacks tonight,” Eric said, with a thin wire of self-pity running through his tone.

  “I found her. If you helped to put her where I found her, I’ve got a grudge against you. If you didn’t, I’m sorry for you. I’m sorry for you anyway.”

  “I’ll be all right tomorrow,” he said. But he said it as if he knew that certain kinds of pictures fade slowly even in sunlight.

  Dr. Savo came out of the inner room with Baker, the petty officer, who looked a year or two older.

  “There’s no sign of assault,” the doctor said. “There are a couple of bruises on her back, but she must have got them climbing out of the window, or swinging against the wall when she dropped. It’s funny nobody saw her or heard her. They usually go into pretty violent convulsions.”

  “Thank you, sir,” Baker said. “I’ll have to call the civilian police, and I guess they’ll be holding an inquest on the body. I never had anything like this come up before. I’ve seen a couple of guys knocked out, but—”

  “Forget it if you can,” Savo said. “That’s one thing I learned in medical school.”

  There was a loud bickering noise in the hall, of several voices raised in argument. I opened the door and saw the Negro, Land, standing in the hallway surrounded by Mrs. Merriwell and her little group. He was directly under a ceiling light, and I had my first good look at him.

  His ears were convoluted and frayed like black rosebuds after a hailstorm. His nose was broad and saddled, his eyes bright black slits between pads of dead tissue. It was an old boxer’s head, powerful and scarred as if it had once been used as a battering ram, set forward on a columnar neck as if it was ready to be used again. But there was no power in the posture of his body. His shoulders drooped forward and his belly heaved with his breathing. His wide hands were half-curled and turned to the light, which shone on the polished dark-pink palms. He looked like a frightened bear caught in a dog-pack.

  “I didn’t have anything to do with it,” he was saying. “I didn’t even know she was up here. I swear to God I didn’t.”

  “What were you doing up here?” said an aging lieutenant whose face drooped like a hound’s.

  “I wasn’t up here, boss—sir. I never set eyes on the young lady.”

  “I saw you,” Mrs. Merriwell said, apparently not for the first time. “I saw you coming out of that door. He killed her,” she said to the others, “I know he did. You can see that he’s guilty just to look at him.”

  Land glanced at the ceiling, the whites of his eyes glaring.

  His eyes shifted right and left, and stopped on me and Eric Swann standing in the doorway. His white steward’s coat was turning dark with sweat. He must have given himself up for lost, for he said to Eric:

  “I was up here, Mr. Swann, I admit that—”

  “You see?” said Mrs. Merriwell. “He admits it.” She looked at Eric triumphantly as if to say: You needed a lesson in race relations, my little man, and now, by God, you’re getting it. “Officer,” she said to Baker, “I demand that you arrest this man.”

  “What were you doing up here?” Eric said.

  “I was looking for a drink. I know I did wrong, but that’s all I was doing, looking for a drink.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “I was looking for somebody’s bottle to take a drink out of. Sometimes some of the young ladies leave their bottles up here, and that’s what I was looking for. I didn’t find any, and then I heard somebody coming. I didn’t see Miss Sholto at all.”

  “Come in here, Land,” Dr. Savo said from the room behind me. “I can settle one point anyway. I’ll ask the rest of you to leave the room, eh?”

  “I wouldn’t stay alone with him, sir,” the manager said. “We wouldn’t want anything else to happen.”

  “You wouldn’t, eh?” Savo said as he shut the door of the dressing-room.

  Mary was standing behind Mrs. Merriwell, looking tired and wan. I moved to her side.

  “That’s a ridiculous story,” Mrs. Merriwell was saying. “Looking for a bottle!”

  “Sue had a bottle in there,” Mary s
aid, and bit her lip as if she regretted saying it. More carrion for the jackals, I thought.

  “Perhaps she did,” Mrs. Merriwell said. “Perhaps she invited the boy in there with her. You never can tell what a nigger-lover will do.”

  Nor what Mrs. Merriwell will say, I thought. Eric looked at her with something like incredulity, but said nothing. Mary took hold of my arm, her fingers clenching painfully, and leaned her weight on me. For the first time in my life I began to see clearly what Dante saw, that hell is largely composed of conversations.

  Dr. Savo opened the door and said briskly to Mrs. Merriwell: “What you suggest is out of the question. Shall I give you the physiological details?”

  “Certainly not,” said Mrs. Merriwell. She lifted her nose and tremulously sniffed the air. “But I think some disciplinary action is called for. At best, he came up here to steal.”

  “He’ll be taken care of,” Eric said. “Don’t worry.”

  Mary’s grip on my arm had relaxed, but she said: “I’m very tired. Do you think I can get home now?”

  “I imagine we’ll have to wait for the civilian police. After all, we were the ones.”

  “That found her, you mean?”

  “It’s after curfew, anyway. Before we can get back to Pearl we’ll have to get a pass.”

  “You’ll be able to get it through the police.”

  “It’s queer they haven’t come yet.”

  I looked around for Baker but he had disappeared. Nearly everyone had left the second floor. But Hector Land was still in the dressing-room when I looked in. He was sitting incongruously on the little yellow stool with his knees spread and his arms hanging straight down between them. In his face only his eyes seemed alive, but they were bright and moving.

  Eric was standing in front of the door to the inner room, staring at Land without seeing him. He was staring harder with eyes at the back of his head which could look through doors. Dr. Savo was watching him.

  “You should go back to the ship and get some sleep,” he said to Eric. “You took an awful beating from the bottle before this happened.” Eric didn’t seem to hear him.

  “What happened to Baker?” I said. “Did he go to call the police?”

  “Right. They should be here now.”

  Mary sat down in an armchair by the window, and I leaned on the arm between her and the coiled rope. She let her head rest against the back of the chair, and her full white throat looked very vulnerable. Nothing was said for what seemed a long time. Perhaps it was only four or five minutes, but the minutes had to chisel their way through stone.

  Finally I heard the irregular rhythm of several pairs of feet on the stairs and in the hall. Baker came into the room with a native police sergeant in olive drab, and a man in grey civilian clothes and a panama hat. He introduced the civilian as Detective Cram.

  Cram took off his hat quickly and jerkily. He was a thin middle-sized, middle-aged man with a hair-trigger smile and frown. They alternated on his face but scarcely changed his expression of cynical curiosity. His mouth was thin, wide and knowing like a shark’s. In a blue polka-dotted bow-tie and a striped silk shirt he looked a little too dapper to be quite real.

  “O.K.,” he said. “There’s been an accident. Show it to me.”

  Savo took him into the inner room. When he came out there was no change in his face or voice.

  “You were the one that found it, eh?” He pointed an eye at me. I said yes.

  “Tell me about it.” I told him about it.

  “So the young lady was with you on the back porch. O.K., I won’t ask what you were doing there.”

  “We were looking for Sue,” Mary said stiffly.

  “Friend of yours?”

  “Yes. We worked in the same place.”

  “You worked at the station with her, eh? Any suggestions as to why she committed suicide?”

  “I didn’t know her that well. She didn’t say anything to me.”

  “Maybe she wouldn’t have to say anything to you?”

  “I don’t know,” Mary said.

  “Who was with her?” He jerked a thumb towards the door behind him. His eyes picked out Eric. “You?”

  “Yes.”

  “Quarrel?”

  “Yes.”

  “How long had you known her?”

  “A year, I guess.”

  “Pretty well, eh?”

  Eric’s grief had carried him beyond reticence. For the time being he was shocked into candor, almost a childish naïveté. “We were in love with each other,” he said.

  “For Christ’s sake, then,” Cram said tonelessly, “why didn’t you get married? She’s no good to anybody now.”

  “I am married.”

  “I see. Congratulations. And the next thing you’ll ask me is can’t I hush this whole god-damn mess up for you.”

  “I haven’t asked you anything,” Eric said. “But now I’ll ask you to go to hell.”

  “Sure sure. Cooperation is all I get. Who’s this?” He looked at Land, who was still sitting by himself watching the rest of the room as if he expected it to close in on him suddenly without warning.

  “Hector Land, sir. I’m a steward on Mr. Swann’s ship.”

  “You own it, eh?” Cram said to Eric. “What’s he here for?”

  “He came here to serve at the party.”

  “Some woman accused him of murdering the girl,” Savo put in. “Raping her and murdering her. He didn’t.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I’m a doctor.”

  “And I’m a cop, but I don’t know a god-damn thing. How do you know?”

  “I examined both of them.” Savo glanced at Mary.

  “I get it. Are those her shoes in there?”

  “I could tell you,” Mary said.

  “Go and get them,” Cram said to the sergeant. “They’re at the end of the couch under the window.”

  They were black pumps, about size 4. Mary looked at them and said they were Sue’s.

  “They were off when you found her, eh?”

  “Yes,” I said. “She was in her stocking feet.”

  “I guess she took them off to climb out of the window,” Cram said. “Well, I’ll see you all at the inquest.”

  “When will that be?” I said.

  “Tomorrow, if I can light a fire under a couple of comics downtown. Why?”

  “I’m awaiting transportation to the mainland. I may get it tomorrow. Is there any chance of my signing a statement if the inquest isn’t held in time?”

  “Can’t wait, eh? How the hell do I know? Everybody pushes me around. Craziest thing I ever did in my life was take off my army uniform.”

  “You were in the army, eh?” I said. “Is that why you don’t like the navy?”

  “I don’t like the army either. I was in the last war. You know, the easy war.”

  “What you need is sleep, Inspector. Why don’t you go home and take it?”

  “Can’t sleep. You’re a doctor,” he said to Savo. “What should I do if I can’t sleep?”

  “Drink whiskey,” Savo said. “You wouldn’t be so nervous if you got drunk every few days.”

  “I can’t get drunk, either. On the jump all the god-damn time. Anyway, at twenty-five dollars a bottle what would I be doing with whiskey on my salary?”

  “Would you mind jumping somewhere and getting us curfew passes?” I said. “Or have you got one in your marsupial pouch?”

  “A kangaroo, get it, sergeant?” Cram said.

  “No, sir.”

  “Let it pass. I can drive you out to the Navy Yard, I guess. After that you’re on your own.”

  “What about Miss Thompson?”

  “Live in town?”

  “Yes,” Mary said. “Quite near here.”

  “We’ll drop you.” He said to the sergeant, “You stay here. They’ll probably come for her soon.”

  When we went downstairs there was nothing left of the party but overflowing ashtrays, empty and half-empty glasses
which hung a sour smell in the air, chairs grouped here and there still in the attitudes of intimacy, emptiness and silence where there had been crowds, music and laughter. Everyone had gone home but Gene Halford, who was standing in the hall talking to the manager.

  “I’m sorry to hear about this,” Halford said to me.

  “We all are. Where are you spending the night?”

  “I’ve been assigned to a BOQ out at the yard, but I haven’t figured out how I’m going to get there. I didn’t go on the bus because I thought I should wait for you.” Curiosity, excitement and pity mingled incongruously in his murky green eyes.

  “What the hell, come with us,” Cram said viciously. “The wagon holds seven, and I’ll make everything right by joining the Drivers’ Association in the morning. My name’s Cram. Detective Cram.”

  “Halford’s my name. Are you investigating this murder?”

  “I wouldn’t know.”

  “You’re a lucky man, Mr. Cram, to be able to feel so casual about things.”

  “I mean I don’t know whether it’s a murder,” Cram snapped. “Do you?”

  “When women commit suicide they don’t usually hang themselves,” Halford said dogmatically. “Unless of course they have a reason for wanting to look ugly after they die.” His eyes in quick malice flicked toward and away from Eric’s face. “Love isn’t stronger than death, but vanity is.”

  Eric was too remote to be hurt, and didn’t hear him. His pale eyes were set like stones, mesmerized by the ruined body which he had seen on the floor, blinded to everything else by grief and shame.

  “Hold your tongue,” I said to Halford, “or I’ll run a ring through it.”

  His laughter was quite jolly and extremely hideous.

  3

  I WOKE UP and looked at my wristwatch, which said five o’clock. For a moment I lay tense and empty, waiting for the General Quarters bell to sound. Then I realized, but without relaxing, that I was in the upper bunk in Eric’s stateroom on a ship in Pearl Harbor, where no enemy would strike again for a very long time. But I did not relax. There are things more terrible to the imagination than Kamikaze planes, and my imagination had lain prostrate among those things all night.